Take a straw poll in the Autocar office and you’ll find a bunch of commentators who largely think that the E-Class Coupé is quite a handsome machine.
BMW It’s perhaps less rakish than a 6 Series, but there’s an elegance to its lines, with fairly conventional proportions given a sense of grace by the rising waistline and hidden B-pillar.
Underneath the bodywork is the Mercedes MRA (Modular Rear Architecture) platform. Mercedes, like most car makers, has set out to reduce the overall number of different architectures it uses, because developing an entire architecture is expensive.
Spawning a new model off of an architecture is slightly less expensive, so the MRA joins a front-drive architecture, a tall vehicle architecture, a sports car one and an electric vehicle one.
Proportionally, the new E-Class Coupé is larger than its predecessor in every major dimension, which is no great surprise given their origins. This, then, is a 4.86m-long car that’s 1.86m wide in the body (2.07m including mirrors) and has a lengthy, 2.87m wheelbase.
The suspension is a multi-link set-up both front and rear. Whereas most E-Class Coupé variants get coil springs as standard and air suspension as an option, this E400 has air suspension across the board. There are three air chambers in each spring strut at the rear of the car, and two at the front, with three levels of spring rate selectable from the driver’s seat. There’s continuously variable damping, too.
